Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “We gotta marshal our forces, concentrate our strength where it counts.”

  There’s not much they can say to that. Time’s of the essence and I nod again, letting them get about telling the others as I move back to where my daughter and the other New Sentinels are mostly too punch drunk still to play good hosts.

  “I need you to keep out of this,” I tell Tessa.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, cautious of her earlier slip. “You can’t protect me forever.”

  “I can try at least until you’re old enough to drink.”

  “That’s five years away,” she complains.

  “Yeah. That sort of underscores the negligence you-know-who thinks is my fault, you running around in costume like this.”

  “She’s jealous,” Tessa says breezily.

  I consider this for a moment, a revelation I’ve never even considered about my ex-wife that now hits me out of nowhere.

  “You think?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “Jesus. Watch the potty-mouth, babe.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  “Well, actually –”

  “What I mean is, I’m in this world now. Powers. They change the rules. You know that, right? You can’t stop me and you shouldn’t anyway. Hypocrite.”

  “Big words, honey.”

  “You really need to start calling me Windsong.”

  “And you need to think twice about this,” I say, glowering before moving off again like a coward, knowing I can’t win this argument and not wanting to stick around to find out why.

  Zephyr 14.3 “Rolling Thunder”

  THE WALLACHIAN FORTRESS materializes over the Capitol building.

  The drawbridge gapes above a scene like from Dante’s Inferno, a dozen civic buildings alight, the main drawcard itself a ruin, the burning air spotted with floating debris and the odd flying figure, streets in all directions overrun with mortal police and soldiers trying to hold their own with scant back-up. There is no disaster plan in place for a contingency like this, which strikes me at once as both inevitable and appalling.

  At my lead, the flyers and those others able to hitch a ride descend like a swarm of gnats from the castle gateway, a few of the heavy hitters like Coalface simply dive-bombing to the ground in a noise akin to rolling thunder. There’s a dusty mushroom cloud where he lands and a sound like a thousands’ hornet’s nests buzzing in displeasure. But I am in default warlord mode, my troops around me, the younger ones and those clearly out of their depths like The Lark, no hard feelings from last time I punched him, I hope, drifting on the thermals as we close to the ground more like a bunch of tandem skydivers than the clarion call of the country’s last line of defense.

  I turn to Heracleon beside me, a sheen of sweat on the Adonis’ gold-headbanded face. He looks like he should’ve changed into his brown spandex, if you know what I mean.

  “What’s the latest?” I ask.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he says. “You have twenty or so in the building itself, that number again to the west.”

  He indicates the direction of the biggest police barricade.

  “Stragglers in pitched battles that way and some over there too, but that’s against parahumans, not police and Army.”

  “OK,” I say, wishing for the first time Nocturne or some bigger name psychic was here to relay my directions.

  I revert to the coarse yell that got me in so much trouble in high school, swearing at the football team as if I could’ve done a better job without my powers.

  “Stick to the game plan! We need our allies, but civilians are the priority!”

  In part I’m yelling for my own sake. The bricks should already be working their way towards the western front to cut the cops and soldiers a break, leaving us to focus on relieving those few good souls still taking the fight to the enemy.

  “Don’t you think we should hit them where they’re concentrated?”

  I look across, eating my own anger to see Windsong beside me.

  “No,” I answer tersely. “If they’re hanging out in there doing God-knows-what, then leave ‘em be. We need to regroup. This is a rescue mission, not an all-out assault.”

  “But there could be politicians still stuck in there,” she says.

  “And?” Off her blank, bleak look I shrug, not a mean feat while flying, and add, “Price of public office, honey. I’ll save a soldier’s life above a pen-pusher’s any day of the week.”

  “But we’re saving our own. It’s supers down there. Masks.”

  “Soldiers,” I stress again. “This is a war, if you didn’t put two-and-two together already. I wanted you back at base for back-up.”

  “For safety, you mean.”

  “Reinforcements.”

  Tessa shakes her head, lustrous lashes dripping with scorn for me as war leader, daddy issues like coconut on a snowball just getting bigger and bigger by the second. She veers away, cutting across the cross currents in seconds, as fast as I ever was.

  I curse to myself, hoping against hope that means she’s returning to the fortress, but I somehow doubt it.

  I turn my eyes to the fast approaching ground.

  *

  WE SPLIT INTO the fire teams I chose pretty much at random back at base. Me, my advisor Heracleon, Manticore, and a cute raven-haired lass called Syzygy whom I’ve literally never heard of before, but told me in the clipped, almost autistic tones of today’s teenagers that she does something with gravity and has powers that vary pending the alignment of the planets. Whatevs, I said back. Didn’t even crack a smile, just five-foot nothing of compact hotness staring up at me like I was the narkiest, most impossibly uncool piece of shit ever to get stuck to the bottom of her size 8 boot.

  At my lead though now she follows as we veer across the burning spectacle of the Capitol up close, a random pair of red eyebeams stabbing up at us out of the dark, Heracleon performing a pretty damned good impersonation of a World War II fighter plane as he tilts away and we hit the gas over the ruins and pass the other civic buildings and cut down low into the nearest side streets, the offices and corner delis and stores designed to catch the eye of unwary bureaucrats and lobbyists on their lunch hour from sucking dick on Capitol Hill, those streets now awash with the trash of flipped over cars, shattered shopfronts, glass glittering like Tolkienesque treasure on the battered asphalt, a hydrant or two sprung loose and shooting geysers into the uncaring sky, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and scorched brick, those few last remaining foolish civilians crouched in the rubble like survivors from a James Cameron movie blinking back at us as we zoom past at below Mach like we are angels or phantoms or ghosts or emissaries of the Unseelie Court as we leave them be, hoping the battle has moved on to give them asylum, at least for now.

  As Heracleon’s cosmic Q&A assured us, we find enough ka-pow and kazam at the next corner, a half-dozen of these striding man-models hemming in Volt and Lynx, the latter backflipping and generally trying not to get her furry ass killed as the black-and-blue-clad brawler Volt shelters them with his quickly evaporating force screens. Despite the only part of his face I can see being his mouth and chin, Volt’s expression melts into one of relief as we ride in.

  Syzygy throws her fingers wide. I get the distinct impression of her hands generating globes of black energy that vanish as fast as they appear and ] everything in a line between her and the closest of Lynx’s attackers flies upward – gravel, rubble, dirt, a few loose bricks, a car bumper and shit – as I’m guessing she negates the Earth’s gravitational pull and that particular Titan turns in surprise just in time to go whipping into the sky and vanishing as a red-and-gold dot fast enough that I fancy he glows like a comet. Might not be enough to kill the dude given these Titans can pretty much all fly, but the Earth spins fast enough that even in those few seconds he’s flung more than fifty miles away.

  I’d applaud, but I’m busy. Frustrated as the clearly freaked-out Heracleon hangs back, I come on two of the Titans menacing V
olt from behind, inspired by Syzygy’s example to grab the first by the scruff of his neck and cape and hurl him across the street, disappearing him into an implosion of heritage architrave, then turning and delivering a point-black Mach speed karate chop to the neck of the guy on my left. Volt drops his force field at once and pours some of his namesake electricity into the guy, and as I’ve established previously, these motherfuckers light up pretty good, and he goes down twitching like a down south Pentecostal speaking in tongues.

  Manticore steps up too. His psychic attack – get this, he calls it his “scorpion sting,” the gaylord – is an aimed effort like any other, but the greenish spark hits the next Titan, this one wearing boots to mid-thigh and huge spiked leather wrist cuffs, and he crumples just as effectively as if he’s been poleaxed.

  It leaves two Titans, the first of whom instantly find themselves victim of 120 pounds of pissed off cat as Lynx screeches and leaps at the dude, hissing, claws slashing perhaps ineffectually at his face as she roars something about never pulling a cat’s tail.

  The last attacker turns his tail to run, but Syzygy promptly triangulates his ass and then the weight of the world is on his shoulders, nearly literally, and he drops to the tiles with a noise like a cement truck tipping over, the pavers at the edge of the street buckling under his sudden weight.

  “Holy shit,” I remark to no one but myself. “We might actually be able to win this.”

  Foolish words, I know.

  Volt, Manticore and Lynx restrain the other Titan, and when he goes to power up his eyebeams, Volt punches him across the jaw about five times, desperate to put him down. We’re like old time gangsters or something. The gaily clad interloper hangs limp in Manticore’s heaving embrace as Heracleon sidles self-consciously up next to me.

  “What do we do with them?” he asks.

  I’m about to answer when the one I felled gets to his feet, glares at us, shoots Volt down with his eyebeams, and then rockets into the air and away. Volt gets back up again looking pissed, brawny physique catching Lynx’s smirk as I glance to the noise of bricks trickling from the hole in the building across the street as I assuage my concerns about the other Titan coming back at us.

  “This is war,” I say to Heracleon. “No prisoners.”

  “You can’t kill them,” he says, more question than statement in his voice.

  “I don’t like the idea either. Not in cold blood, anyway,” I say and shrug like it’s the done deal that, really, we all know it is.

  “We have to put them in custody and –”

  “And what,” Volt says, still smarting, “call for White Nine? Shit got a bit busy here, in case you didn’t notice, motherfucker.”

  “We don’t have to kill them,” Manticore says.

  He motions so we can clue to what he’s saying as he lifts up the clone he’s holding and scowls and a green energy bathes the Titan’s head. I can practically hear the brain cells shrieking and dying. When Manticore lets go, the villain slithers from his grasp like a drunk snake, flopping over, a dud mewling noise the epitaph to his own consciousness.

  I nod to Manticore. “Do it.”

  Brushing back his luscious locks, Manticore crosses to the one Syzygy’s dropped and repeats the trick. The wide-eyed young woman backs away, powers no longer needed to restrain the attacker now he’s brain dead. I have better things to do than this, but I’m conscious and vaguely ashamed as the others watch Manticore use his powers on the third Titan.

  “What have we become?” Heracleon moans.

  “Oh, save it for Facebook,” I snap. “You could’ve taken an active part in this attack if you wanted it to turn out any different. You didn’t, so you don’t get a say.”

  “I needed to stay back,” Heracleon stammers. “You need me. My powers are special –”

  “None of us are special,” I mutter as I take in the lightening sky, daybreak just a few heartbeats away.

  Zephyr 14.4 “Apex Predator”

  I STALK OFF a distance, ready to acknowledge to no one but myself that I’m uneasy about the state of play as well. I killed one of these men in cold blood just hours ago, but that was in the heat of battle and not like some rebel army executing the Opposition once victory’s assured, hearts hardened, Nietzschean parables all coming true. It’s hard to reconcile, but the sounds of ongoing combat ring out across the city and we don’t have the luxury of time and alcohol these philosophical debates require. I find myself oddly fixated on the image of a metal weathervane protruding like a thrown spear from the engine block of a parked government limo, the silver cockerel on the end like some harbinger of an ancient and most resolute doom.

  Snapping my eyes away, I look to the other members of my squad caught in their own awkwardness and introspection. I scan Volt and Lynx.

  “You OK?”

  Volt nods back, still out of breath. Lynx looks fine. More than fine, in fact, the feeling of stirring loins odd not just because we’ve only just escaped the frying pan and we’re still at the fire’s edge, but because however lissome Lynx might be, you’re talking about a cat-faced, 100 per cent fur-covered hardbody, her spotted tail waving slightly in the air to the same beat as her playful smirk, green eyes twinkling as I awkwardly look away, not the sole apex predator in this particular jungle it seems.

  “Alright then,” I say, remustering my mojo with difficulty. “Hero, next stop?”

  Heracleon doesn’t like the epithet however much it doesn’t suit him, compliment that it might be. With a truculent flutter of his lashes, he rolls his eyes up inside his head as he consults with his oracle, then moments later lifts a finger and points, Juju style, further into the entangled streets of the inner city.

  “Another mask is holed up in a book depository.”

  “Let’s roll.”

  *

  IT’S JUST COINCIDENCE that I give Lynx a lift, carrying her in my arms as she gracefully and quite willingly curls her arms around my shoulders and her tail around my thigh. I mean, the girl can’t fly and what’s a fella to do?

  We motor over the rooftops, just a hop, skip and a jump from the last scene. Heracleon, Manticore and Syzygy flying, Volt propelling himself along in a similar fashion that, like so many things, are based on radically different physics.

  There’s three Titans with their eyes on this kid Strike’s location. I’ve never heard of him before myself, maybe just a whisper or two, nothing I can actually drudge up to provide useful details other than obviously he’s got some kind of natty distance attack, evidenced by the way his enemies have positioned themselves on separate flanks from his position, two on roofs overlooking the brick building from where they lob everything from torn-out fire hydrants to Japanese convertibles. We glimpse the purple flash of Strike returning fire, but it’s an impasse – an impasse we’re more than happy to tip over.

  At little more than a hand signal, our increased squadron divides in three and Heracleon and I arc down towards the closest of the Titans, black-caped for some reason, alternating between cover and firing his red eye-beams at the corner where Strike’s ensconced. The interloper barely has time to swivel about before I slam my left across his jaw and his legs smash through the lip of the wall protruding above the rooftop and then he goes over the edge, catching himself halfway and flying back in a double-fisted ram raid that has me bending aside like I’m in the Matrix, Heracleon diving for cover like the Nancy I’m rapidly realizing he is, our black-caped attacker turning on a dime to open up again with the eye lasers as I scoop a handful of bricks and concrete powder and throw them at him as I time-lapse forward and deliver possibly the most impeccable left hook ever seen into the bastard’s ribs, the bones crunching under my assault, wonderboy gasping and his eyes popping out as he’s lifted off the ground and then takes my right across his jaw in bone-snapping impact that sends him across the roof, rebounding off an air-conditioning unit and then disappearing in an awry tangle of senseless arms and legs off the edge of the building.

  “Zephyr!” I h
ear Volt’s yodel. “Heads up!”

  Heracleon and I dance again as one of these brothers from another mother come barreling towards us, flying with a vintage-era Morris Minor he tosses like a retarded kid bowling, the dangerous missile cartwheeling across the surface athwart the tenement building and us making scarce as it goes by dislodging side mirrors and paneling and bits and bobs, finally crunching to a stop over near the far side before the whole roof lurches and then collapses through into the next storey, clearly a canny way of uncovering structural faults, throwing a fucking car at it; and into that surprised gap I fire a lightning bolt our attacker narrowly avoids, turning tail so I chase him across the block to the rooftop of the book depository so we duke it out beneath one of those giant billboards erected for no other purpose than some architect sold the city council on his ability to invoke the heritage values of the neighborhood erased by the Kirlians in ’84.

  Up close, this latest incarnation smells like he’s been rolling in soiled underpants and I’d tell him as much except he seems to have some pretty serious dance moves on him, schooled in some freaky martial art I don’t recognize instead of being just a tough brawler like the others of his kind. After blocking a few goes at my head, I manage to get the guy in a headlock and a foot behind one leg and we go plunging backwards into the door from the top of the building, suddenly in the dark as we crash and tumble down the staircase into the building’s gullet, the sweaty bastard not letting go nor letting me choke the life out of him as he lets rip with a few experimental bursts of his eye heaters and I probe his ribs with my elbows and finally wind up on something resembling level ground, both hands under his chin as I flip him bodily over my shoulder, tumbling across the room into the storage space from a forgotten office supplies business, old photocopiers, decrepit 1990s-era electronics, broken telephones and faxes and strange curly-corded devices I frankly don’t recognize in the heat of the moment as Titan swims about like a man just finding his footing, and the good sense occurs to me to jet straight into him so that we smash through the metal shelving and the wall its screwed into, sunlight from dirty great panes of the upper warehouse floor bathing across us as we bounce like billiard balls over the chipped and paint-stained concrete one finds beneath old carpet once its removed, a hand under the guy’s belt as I rain punches onto the side of his neck and head before I have to bull him off by main strength alone, cheek burning as a sustained burst from his eye beams threatens to cook my head like a barbecue. My knee goes into Titan’s solar plexus and he grunts, heaving, then actually barfs soapy fluid all over my right foot as he gasps for breath, and I take the momentary reprieve to channel a small power station into the back of his neck and he lays down like an animal surrendering to slaughter in the grisly contents of his own stomach, and well, perhaps I lay the boot in a few times for good measure before I become conscious of the slow pad of booted footfalls echoing across the abandoned open-plan space.